Author's note: This is pure fantasy, with demons and demonesses playing superheros and supervillains blessed with unrealistic bodies and weird powers. It also has fairly obvious inspirations, and it becomes quite hard-core, with bits of brutal and extreme sex. It's also horribly over-written and has far too many words in its sentences, because it was fun to do that way. You have been warned. Read with caution.
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Lilith dressed conservatively. She always did. The attention she would attract otherwise was always more trouble than it was worth, for she had little tolerance for fools, none for lecherous idiots, and her self-control was fragile at best when all it took was a spark of anger to unleash hell. She wore a pants suit in a muted shade of brown, over a basic white business blouse and simple black court-soled shoes. Her clothes were tailored carefully to hide the fact that underneath them her body was hard and followed both the supple muscular curves of an athlete and the long-limbed, tiny-waisted, large-breasted proportions of a dancer in the clubs where the first rule was Don't Touch. Indeed, she chose her bras well, to restrain and conceal breasts that filled out a D cup with ease, and needed no support at all, and for the same reason wore her blouses loose and in styles that buttoned to the neck. Her hair, which would not be suffer itself to be cut, was auburn-red and flowed to her waist, kept usually in a single clip with Celtic knot-work showing to the world.
She often wore a scarf about her neck, to more effectively conceal her figure, but it took real concentration to carry a posture which did not electrify strangers with her self-possession, her natural authority, and her physicality. It was most often the flash in her eyes which cowed them from attempting a more intimate acquaintance than merely a glance, or the briskness and crispness of her walk that soured them to the idea of her femininity.
She considered her looks a curse and her body a curse, but for dramatically different reasons, and wasn't sure that she wasn't right about the latter, for she never slept, her hair grew back within seconds of being cut, cuts in her skin healed in seconds and within her mind there lurked a beast which took physical form.
It had taken her years to harness it, to force it to her will and to realise that it was part of her to be cherished and used, not feared and fought, and when she did she made it work, and the first thing she was did was to find the boy who had raped her in high school, and peel the flesh from his body.
The city knew when Lilith awoke to her self, but did not know what had happened - merely the results. That boy was only the first. Known rapists, stand-over men and underworld debt collectors were found dead in fashions that turned the stomachs of beat policemen and forced nightmares into their heads. Sometimes the bewildered pathologists thought that swords had been involved, sometimes ice-picks, sometimes they suggested pick-axes or even machetes, but none of them approached even close to an answer. There were witnesses - victims who had survived - but not survived with mind entirely intact and those who did not shut out the memory entirely talked in wild, gibbering sentences of monsters and grotesque aliens.
The police, however, were in agreement on one word, and that was vigilante, for the killings had neither the direction of turf warfare nor the increase in crime that a new and ferocious crime lord would cause. Indeed, there were periods when crimes of casual violence plummeted as fear warred with psychopathology or the necessities of dirty business in the minds of perpetrators. But it was a rare night that Lilith's beast did not get to slake its thirst, a thirst that never seemed to be entirely quenched.
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It was a half-finished block of apartments this time - luxury suites, large and spacious and not yet fitted out. She could smell out violence being done, but this time it was like a hook that had been inserted into her nose. It was like nothing she had ever met, and she went in with her hackles raised, ready to rip anyone and anything to shreds, the beast almost willing to kill itself in a glorious orgy of death if it found itself outclassed.
The building was locked, but that proved no obstacle to her, and even through the concrete and the solid, expensive-apartments construction she was drawn upwards as if to a beacon, moving up staircases with effortless and noiseless bounds from floor to floor.
The reek of violence done was smeared all over the inside of the building, trailing in and out of rooms, and leaving one guard who had been not merely killed, but shredded and eviscerated. Lilith was shocked, but the beast howled for blood and drove her onwards.
She followed the reek in her mind up to the roof, up past floors which were increasingly bare concrete, with first exposed wires and then none at all, and concrete dust and discarded rubbish lying scattered about, until she came to the last staircase, the last door, and burst once more into open air upon the very top of the building.
The rage of the beast drove her on, or she would have stopped stupefied at the sight. The figure standing on the open expanse of roof was not a man because it was not human. It towered eight feet tall and five broad, with the short, bandy legs and huge arms of an ape, but all as if carved out of mobile, segmented and floating plates of granite, with a torso a crude travesty of human proportions.
Dangling in his arms was a female security guard, chunky but big-breasted and unconscious, which Lilith could tell, without knowing how, was due to the pall of musk which hung about the figure nearly tangible. She was breathing raggedly, breasts heaving, eyes rolled back in her head and twitching like a woman in the depths of brain-wiping, energy-sapping lust.
He looked up as she exited the door and smiled, lips not quite rock and not quite scabbed flesh, parting and splitting, revealing jagged teeth and a crimson snake-like tongue that ran over them as if to taste her presence.
"Ah, I could taste you as soon as you entered the building," he said with a voice like gravel tumbling down a hillside slope, "But what are you? You look too delicious to be good, and too human to be evil."
The beast did not let Lilith be shocked or surprised or worried, it was baying at the leash to be released and drove her forwards, confident through lack of fear. "I am me," she said levelly, still in her human voice, "And I am going to fuck you up, whatever you are."
He laughed, hugely, and casually tossed the security guard to one side, letting her hit the ground with a wet thump.
"Show me how!" He challenged her. "Show me what you are!"
As they confronted each other, she changed.
Chitinous-looking armour, sharp-edged and uneven, covered her limbs, swallowing her flesh without concealing entirely her long-limbed, large-breasted, narrow-waisted physique and, with barely a flicker of reality, displacing and removing her clothing. From above each wrist, extending forwards at least two feet, grew two curved, dully gleaming blades, sharp top and bottom and tapering to a needle point. She became an eye-deceiving, migraine-inducing, sculptured and sculpted travesty of a human form, as dangerous and friendly as a scorpion.
He laughed, a sound at once harsh, delighted and triumphant.
